“Odessa,” the lead single from Caribou’s latest album Swim, has been delightfully ubiquitous this summer. You’ve almost certainly spent some time tapping your left foot to it at a red light, or mumbling an off-key “she can say, she can say, who know’s what she’s gonna say?” while dancing in the shower. “Odessa” is the most blissfully catchy anthem of a dysfunctional relationship to capture our ears in a while, and in the world of pop music, that’s saying something.

As well as being Swim’s lead single, “Odessa” is also the album’s opening track, the sunny shore of Caribou’s nine-song wide electronic sea. It’s a logical placement — the song is both the record’s catchiest and most accessible. Continue past “Odessa” and you’ll find yourself wading deeper into the waters of both dance and experimental music. Synthesizers and drum machines combine with unusual instruments like Tibetan singing bowls, and a variety of textures and rhythms mix and mingle. Through all the heterogeneity, however, the album strongly maintains the feel of a cohesive whole.

Caribou - real name Dan Snaith - has a PhD in pure mathematics, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his music is very much about ideas. While Snaith denies that Swim is a concept album, it is certainly a concepts album, influenced equally by his immersions into dance music and, yes, swimming.

Almost immediately after accepting the 2008 Polaris Prize for his album Andorra, Snaith returned to his home in London (England, not Ontario) and submerged himself in the club scene. Though he had drifted away from dance music in recent years, he suddenly found his enthusiasm for it rejuvenated, and when seeking a direction for his new album it seemed a logical path to follow. “In the last year [I'd] been DJing more often, as well as going to more clubs and gigs, and I’ve just been more excited by the dance music I’ve heard, so it was a natural thing to have the music go in that direction.” Taking advantage of his friend Kieran Hebden’s DJ residency at London club Plastic People, Snaith club-tested many tracks before the album was even complete, gauging the crowd’s reactions to make sure the desired energy came across. It does: Swim is dancey indeed, but not frantically so; rather, its downtempo electropop encourages a sort of loose, liquid hip shaking, a languid sinuosity.

If Swim is, in the big-picture sense, about making you move your body, it is also remarkably intellectual at the details level. Here’s where Snaith’s newfound passion for swimming comes in: “Everybody’s familiar with how the sonic sense is different underwater and above water, and so [when swimming] you’re in this weird kind of sonic space that rocks back and forth. And I thought, that’s an interesting idea to do that with some sounds on the record. In one ear, the sound is very crisp and clear, and in the other it’s kind of reverb-y or echo-y, and then it oscillates back and switches the other way around.” Not only does this effect mirror the aural experience of swimming, but the sinusoidal pattern of the fluctuations gives the music a wavelike, oceanic feel.

Swim is modern and summery, energetic but not frantic, light and shimmery and atmospheric. Despite its nascence on massive club sound systems, this album will be just as at home in your car CD player, especially with the windows down and summer’s golden light pouring in.